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Category Archives: public relations

An image supplied by Alberta-based energy company TransCanada that was featured in Canadian government advertising promoting the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington. Photo courtesy of Natural Resources Canada

This brochure promoting TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline was distributed at a recent ALEC conference. TransCanada said it’s not a member of ALEC but that it sponsored an “ice cream social” event at the meeting. Photo courtesy of Nick Surgey, Center for Media and Democracy.

Exxon Mobil says there is “no story” for reporters to tell about its funding for the American Legislative Exchange Council – a non-profit organization that connects lobbyists with American state legislators on secretive committees that draft model laws in a wide range of public policy issues.

Exxon Mobil also requested to speak to an editor from the Toronto Star to explain why there was “no story.”

The company said that it doesn’t deny climate change.

A new story about ALEC was published by the Toronto Star on Saturday and you can find it here.

Participants in a June 2014 “healing walk” around oilsands facilities, close to Fort McMurray, Alberta, stop near a pond filled with toxic tailings waste.

Who are Health Canada’s experts assessing human health impacts of oilsands development? And why has the federal government never done a comprehensive study of health impacts in the region after more than half a century of industrial development?

These are among the questions I asked Health Canada in early July as part of my research for this oilsands story published this week.

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet ministers fanned out across the country Monday to counter a “black out” campaign launched by charities that are accusing the government of using budgetary measures to weaken federal environmental oversight and intimidate critics.

Led by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, the cabinet ministers used their campaign to tout the government’s budget plan and its supporting legislation, which would rewrite several environmental laws and significantly reduce the number of federal scientists monitoring Canada’s air, wildlife, waterways and oceans.

More than 500 groups, including some south of the border in the United States, symbolically blacked out their websites to protest the measures in the budget and its supporting legislation, Bill C-38. They claim the plan is the result of intensive lobby efforts from the oil and gas industry.